It’s LGBTQ+ History Month in the UK, which means I’m thinking about Christopher Marlowe – again – even after spending half my earthly existence writing a novel about him. Despite having been a major influence on Shakespeare, an innovator of English poetic form, a writer of numerous homoerotic verses, and the author of the 1st English play to feature an explicitly homosexual relationship between men, Marlowe is often left off the Queer Historical Figures roundups that come out around this time of year. Which, y’know, really bugs me.
So what happened? Who was “Kit” Marlowe, and why is he still important?
Marlowe’s story is often likened to that of a tragic rockstar: the flame that burned bright, and much too fast. After sailing to the highest tier of English poets at just 24 years old, Marlowe’s life came to a violent end before he turned 30, in 1593. His murder continues to baffle historians, and is a huge topic all its own. But right now, I’d rather talk about the circumstances that led up to it, and what they mean for his legacy.
Scholars disagree as to exactly how much trouble Marlowe was in at the time of his death, or what exactly put him on the wrong side of the law. Nevertheless, 10 days prior to his murder, Marlowe was placed under arrest and ordered to make daily reports to the Privy Court in London. Just 6 days after that, Richard Baines, a spy with whom Marlowe had once spent an ill-fated winter abroad, handed in a document to the English authorities accusing Marlowe of sedition, heresy, and sodomy, and suggesting he might have been guilty of far worse.
But it wasn’t Marlowe’s actions that were of concern to the powers-that-be. It was his words.
The “Baines Note,” as it is now known, allegedly records things that Marlowe said, albeit abstracted from any context. Did Marlowe ever say, as Baines claimed, that John the Baptist and Christ were lovers, or that “all they that love not tobacco & boys are fools,” or – very dangerously for the time – that the world was far older than Adam & Eve? We don’t really know, and some scholars dismiss the Baines Note as mere slander. But Marlowe had stoked controversy before. One year prior to Marlowe’s death, his fellow playwright Robert Greene had even made veiled references to Marlowe’s “atheism,” saying, “he hath said… ‘There is no God.'”
Was Marlowe, as accused by Baines and Greene, an “atheist?” Maybe not, at least in the modern sense. He was, however, prompting people to ask questions about the religious doctrine by which the laws of the land forced them to abide. He was poking fun at dogma, and by extension, mocking the queen.
We tend to think of pre-20th century history as dominated by rampant queerphobia, and therefore might expect Marlowe to have been persecuted mainly for his sexuality. But in fact, it was his heresy that made him more dangerous to public order. Marlowe’s England was ruled, above all, by religion. Even now, the myth of the peaceful, progressive Elizabethan Golden Age persists – a myth that was formulated while Elizabeth I still ruled. But in fact, the reign of Elizabeth was marked by war, rebellion, and religious strife, leading her government to impose still harsher strictures than her predecessors on anyone caught deviating from the Protestant Church of England, of which Elizabeth herself was the head.
To so much as voice doubts about “her Majesty’s church” in any form was not merely heretical, but potentially treasonous. Do it loudly enough, and the punishment was death.
Although heresy was the deadliest of the accusations levied against Marlowe, the crime of sodomy also technically carried a death sentence, and had since the time of Henry VIII, with the passing of the “Buggery Act” in 1533. But it would not be until later, with the rise of Puritanism, that this law would be enforced in the extreme against gay men and gender nonconforming people.
During Marlowe’s lifetime, certain forms of homosexual behavior were tacitly condoned, so long as they fell within strict parameters determined largely by class, race, and age. The sexual use (and abuse) of servants by masters, or underage prostitutes by wealthy men, went broadly unprosecuted. Loving, committed same-sex relationships, on the other hand, brought certain dangers, which Marlowe explored thoroughly in his play Edward II.
There’s a group of academics out there who argue quite adamantly against including Marlowe in the queer canon, despite the queer themes found throughout his body of work. Largely, these scholars’ reluctance is based in the fear that Marlowe’s queerness somehow feeds into the feverish speculation that surrounds his life, and to a greater extent, his death. To claim Marlowe as queer, in short, would be unseemly. Hysterical. Melodramatic. Playing into conspiracy.
Whether or not Marlowe was queer is not really the point. Marlowe never married, maintained long-term, intimate relationships with other men for the entirety of his adult life, and was surrounded by rumors of homosexuality both during his lifetime and afterwards. But what really matters is that Marlowe wrote queer stories – was, in fact, among the first English writers to do so, and do so consistently. Marlowe gave queer stories, queer love, queer desire a seat at the table, to an extent that no one would dare do again till centuries later.
So why, in queer history, is Marlowe so often left out of the conversation?
Well, Elizabethan propagandists were extremely successful in destroying Marlowe’s reputation, aided later on by good ol’ Victorian Comstockery. Mere months after Marlowe’s death, moralists and mouthpieces of the state mounted a smear campaign against him, maligning him first of all for his heretical beliefs and, in time, for his rumored sexual “deviance.” The archival discovery of the “Baines Note” in the 1780s led to a firestorm of disapproval in the decades that followed. By the 19th century, performances of Marlowe’s plays were often heavily censored, and accompanied by withering caveats about the author’s “degenerate character.”
To put it in modern terms, Marlowe was “cancelled.”
By the 20th century, Marlowe, once known as “the Muses’ darling,” had become a dark, controversial figure, dogged by a “bad boy” image, overshadowed by his longer-lived and less incendiary contemporary Shakespeare. But here’s the thing: Marlowe’s life was short and violent, but in fact not unusually violent for his time (see: Ben Jonson, actually killed a guy!) Some deride Marlowe’s plays as loud, garish gorefests, but Shakespeare frequently outpaces him in blood n’ guts, and frankly, the perception that Marlowe’s language was overblown or bombastic probably says more about our mania for comparing everything written in this time period to Shakespeare than it actually does about Marlowe as a writer.
Drawing comparisons between Marlowe and Shakespeare does both authors a disservice. Shakespeare built an incredibly successful career on not ruffling feathers (for the most part, see: Essex Rebellion), nostalgia, populism, and sentimentality. Marlowe was a very different writer, drawing on a proto-camp sensibility to tell stories that subverted the jingoistic myths of Elizabethan England. His theatre was political, jarring, irreverent. It was Charles Ludlam, not Andrew Lloyd Webber; John Waters, not James Cameron.
This is why I spent so… damn… long writing a novel about Marlowe, and why I feel like it’s high time he took his rightful place in queer history, as one of our ancestors. I hate all this self-promo stuff as much as any writer on the Internet, but if I look upon the task ahead as promoting Marlowe, and his story, it gets a little easier to show up and do my little dance.
Marlowe lived in a time of moral panics, global strife, and cultural upheaval, not so alien to our own. His story has a lot to reveal about our world today.
Don’t take my word for it: read Marlowe’s Edward II – a devastating play about a king who loves his male lover much more than his kingdom, and pays the ultimate price for his devotion. Read Hero & Leander, an erotic, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking pansexual romp about sexual awakenings and love – or lust – at first sight. Read about his riotous, glorious, tragic life.
Or if you wanna make this humble scribbler’s day a little brighter, preorder my book LIGHTBORNE, coming Oct 22nd 2024 to the USA – or if you’re in the UK, head to your local booksellers or buy online.
(This post is modified from a thread originally posted on Threads, 5 Feb 2024. It was last updated on 14 Oct 2024.)
HESSE PHILLIPS 